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The web producers from the UK Parliament website were lucky enough to get a behind the scenes view of the Assembly’s website. We were able to share ideas and experiences with people who have to work in a similar environment to us.
We talked about the use of multimedia and social networking tools; had a look at the content management system which powers their website; discussed how NAW’s intranet is structured and maintained; we also discussed the use of e-petitions and forums.
We were given a tour of the remarkable Assembly building and watched a few minutes of question time. A great day was had by all.
In an attempt to get some feedback about the Parliament Podcast Pilot we visited a secondary school in South London. It was a really positive experience.
We spoke to a group of about 20 first year A-Level Government and Politics students. We did a few demonstrations and asked the students to do some exercises which got them to visit different parts of the site. The students also filled in a questionnaire which provided some useful insight into their level of political engagement and how they access information about politics and current affairs.
Throughout we encouraged discussion and feedback about the various services on the site. The group we spoke to gave us lots of constructive feedback about podcasts and the site as a whole. We are using this experience to inform the development of the podcast pilot.
As we said previously, people are enjoying our Big Ben content – which is good, because we enjoy going up there and taking video/images/audio.
It’s the 150th anniversary of Big Ben next year, and we went up the Tower today to get some more video content to tie in with the expected increased interest in the world’s most famous clock. This includes more footage of the clock engineers at work (great team) and a first-person viewpoint of climbing up the Tower – if our editing skills are up to it. Watch this space.
Filming an engineer checking the clock mechanism.
The view down into the belfry from the Ayrton light, which is at the top of the Tower.
One of the eye-opening things that came out of our user-testing session yesterday was that a lot of people don’t know what RSS is (here’s Wikipedia’s explanation of RSS). It’s easy for our team to run off and get excited about Twitter, RSS, Delicious, etc, but we have to remember that it’s likely that the majority of our users haven’t even heard of these services, let alone use them.
But people have heard of email, right? To that end we’re making an email subscription to this blog available, and a get-all-subscription to all our RSS content. With more to follow when we have time. We were prompted to do this work when a member of the public emailed us, so hopefully this proves that we’re listening to our users!
Today the prototypes for the parliamentary websites were being put through their paces (see images).
5 users tested prototype versions of a new homepage design, a News service, an enhanced calendar and a new current issues area for the site.
The sessions were really helpful – it’s amazing how you fail to spot the obvious when you have been working on a design/topic for so long. The user testing has thrown up a whole host of issues that we need to address before we go live with the products
Even before we get the reports from Optimum Web (the company running the test sessions) there are immediate improvements that we can make to the prototypes.
Watch this space for news of new releases.
